Technical Standards in Engineering Program

Academic institutions nationwide are expected to provide basic technical standards education and training to engineering students; however, they are not positioned or incentivized to incorporate such education into their academic programs. They lack expertise, resources, funding, and time. As a result, student engineers rarely receive formal education on the fundamentals of technical standards. While a piecemeal resolution approach has been used in the past few decades to increase technical standards education in single groups, programs, and academic departments, the gap between the supply and demand of engineering students, new hires, and professional engineers with licensure who are properly educated on the basics of technical standards is increasing rapidly. Ultimately, the nation's engineering workforce is under-prepared to meet the growing safety challenges of today and to prevent new and ongoing risks and hazards to the public.

The Technical Standards in Engineering Program addresses this national crisis by providing educators with pre-curated content on the fundamentals of technical standards. It is a free open-source curriculum that consolidates publicly available technical standards information into a simplistic customizable curriculum. It answers questions such as: What is a technical standard? Why are they important? How are they developed? There are nine modules that can be integrated into existing courses or used to develop new courses. The program is available to anyone with an email address via the learning management system Canvas.